GILROY
– Walking down Fifth Street on the west side of Gilroy one
afternoon last week, one couldn’t help but smell it – garlic.
But not the garlic smell that has slowly taken over the city as
the 25th Garlic Festival quickly approaches; this aroma could be
pinpointed to one spot
– Sam Bozzo’s house.
GILROY – Walking down Fifth Street on the west side of Gilroy one afternoon last week, one couldn’t help but smell it – garlic.
But not the garlic smell that has slowly taken over the city as the 25th Garlic Festival quickly approaches; this aroma could be pinpointed to one spot – Sam Bozzo’s house.
In Bozzo’s backyard – now known as the Embassy of the Republic of Gilroy thanks to an engraved sign he received as a gift from friend Shane Ryken – Bozzo and his friend and co-chef Gene Sakahara were entertaining a small group in their usual joking manner. However, the food they were cooking up was anything but usual – at least when compared to what one usually would find at Gourmet Alley.
As the two stood over a wok – one of three purchased from a Bay Area cooking supply store for the Garlic Festival – Bozzo yelled in his best Emeril impression, “Bam, bam,” as he tossed cilantro onto their latest garlic concoction: garlic ginger chicken stir fry.
“Now, I’ll do Val Filice,” Bozzo said, his voice slower and deeper. “Mooore gaaarlic.”
After several months of getting the ingredients just right, team SakaBozzo was just fine-tuning and teaching people how to make the chicken dish for this year’s festival. It will be Gourmet Alley’s first Asian-style dish.
“It’s like an amusement park where (visitors) want to try the new ride. Here they want to try the new dish,” Bozzo said. “We’re the premier food festival, so we need to come up with a new dish.”
The chicken stir fry was created after the Gourmet Alley committee asked the two chefs for an Asian-style dish with chicken in it.
“We were looking for a light dish,” Gourmet Alley Chairman Hugh Davis said.
They started with one of Sakahara’s recipes.
“We started coming up with something of Gene’s and added from there,” Bozzo said.
“We actually started taking away,” said Sakahara, whose recipe called for a wide array of ingredients.
While the two cut down on what’s in the dish – peanuts were removed because some people have allergies and others such as peas were eliminated due to the cost of the dish – there is a long list of ingredients, including chicken, garlic, ginger, onions, bell peppers, broccoli, wine, soy sauce, olive oil, sesame, vinegar, noodles, crushed red pepper and cilantro.
After finalizing the ingredients, Bozzo had the dish analyzed by a nutritionist in Salinas, who found that each serving has 485 calories.
“We wanted it to be healthy,” Sakahara said.
Bozzo agreed.
“I would think that it would be a lot lower than anything else we’re serving at Gourmet Alley,” he said.
According to Bozzo’s son Greg, assistant chairman of Gourmet Alley, they hope to sell 4,500 to 5,000 servings of the new dish during the three-day weekend. Seven volunteers will be on-hand at all times to help keep the three woks running all day for the long lines.
The dish has been taste-tested by visitors of a health fair through the Monterey County Office of Education, the Gilroy Presbyterian Primetimers, the festival board, Community Media Access Partnership employees, and countless times by the two chefs themselves. The two also taped a demonstration of their new dish for television station KSBW-8, which will aired Saturday.
“We’ve gotten a really good response so far,” Bozzo said.
Davis agreed, saying it is just what Gourmet Alley’s vision was for the dish.
“Now, if only 5,000 more people like it,” he said.
